We will perform an upgrade to the Blaq System this weekend that will include some new features and bug fixes. You and your colleagues may experience some minor downtime at some stage between 9 AM Saturday, September 14 and 9 PM Sunday, September 15.

These upgrades do not affect the operation of any existing users of Blaq. Read below for the exciting new features that you can take advantage of.

The new features include:

Colour coding Departments. Each department can have a colour set for them ( go To Administration, Branches, select a branch, Departments, select a department and choose a colour for the Department - note, you can enter your own RGB colour or select from the available palate). This will allow you to quickly see which jobs are assigned to which department on the Job Schedule by colour.

A warning symbol will be displayed on the left side of the job list in the Job Schedule screen if the Job is Created and is Required within the same day. To turn on this feature, go to Administration, Options and select Transactions Tab. Scroll down to the Transaction Settings section and set Display job schedule warning to Yes.

On the Job Schedule screen, the + and - buttons have been made larger to allow better accuracy when using Blaq on your iPad

For Deliveries, Jobs, Purchase Orders and Quotes - when creating a new, the Attn, Phone and Company on the Address tab is now defaulting to the selected Contact.

What’s coming up in October

Payroll

Bank Reconciliation

Integration with another Job Management System called Coredination – www.coredination.net. This is very exciting as you will be able to manage aspects of your job remotely on your mobile device. You initiate the Quote and the Job in Blaq and continue managing the Job on your mobile device; Report Times Sheets and products, do complex routing, attach photos and take customer signatures.

We will perform an upgrade to the Blaq System this weekend that will include some new features and bug fixes. You and your colleagues may experience some minor downtime between 9 AM Saturday, August 3 and 9 PM Sunday, August 4.

These upgrades do not affect the operation of any existing users of Blaq. Read below for the exciting new features that you can take advantage of. Please contact me if you would like to start using any of these new features as some of them will require initial setup.

The new features include:

integration with XERO, the accounting package - www.xero.com. Right now we integrate Sales, Accounts, Contacts and Purchases. We will do more work on this during the year and become a XERO Developer Partner

integration with a simple time tracking system called Toggl - www.toggl.com. This allows for Blaq users to track time on a job from your mobile device. The time entries will then flow into the costing side of the job.

adding Paid as a new status on the Job. This will include all Jobs that have been customer paid. Invoiced status are now Jobs that are invoiced but not yet paid.

starting to add Basic Accounting to Blaq. This will aim at companies not needing a whole accounting system to run their business. This version includes Bank Transactions, and Journal Entries. Over the next few months we will add Reconciliation and Payroll to finish this off.

Budgets on GL Accounts have been added as part of the accounting. This will allow you to measure the performance per Category or GL Account.

Profit Loss

Balance Sheet

Budget Analysis

entering the Nett amount in production details, making the system calculate the Unit Price and the Total.

a rework of the GL Accounts so they can be used in the accounting.

You can create Header Accounts to enable hierarchies of accounts.

Initial balance for a GL Account can be entered

Bank details has been moved to the GL accounts section

You will see a new menu called Banking, this is where the new accounting features will be found. There will also be a new menu under Administration called Banking where we have moved the following functions:

GL Accounts

Tax Rates

Payment Terms

Payment Methods

What’s coming up:

Payroll

Bank Reconciliation

Integration with another Job Management System called Coredinationwww.coredination.net. This is very exciting as you will be able to manage aspects of your job remotely on your mobile device. You initiate the Quote and the Job in Blaq and continue managing the Job on your mobile device; Report Times Sheets and products, do complex routing, attach photos and take customer signatures.

Mozilla has released another update to their popular Firefox web browser after only recently updating it to version 4. This time it's version 5 and from our testing here, we've found it continues to be a great browser and a worthwhile update. We've tested it with Blaq and found no problems so far besides the same problem we had with version 4 - previewing PDF's in the browser on Macs. Unfortunately, Firefox still doesn't do this without an add-on, and even the add-on solution isn't that simple.

We've read reports that Mozilla is developing a PDF viewer for Firefox, but we don't know if and when this will be available. Instead of waiting, we've done some research and found 2 solutions.

The first is the easiest - an add-on from Schuber|it. Their PDF Browser Plugin works well but would require the purchase of a site license if it was to be used with Blaq. It's free for not-for-profit activities if used at home or educational institutions, but we don't believe this would cover Blaq so our users would need to buy the license. A site license is only (USD) so it could be worthwhile depending on the size of your organisation.

The second solution is free but more complicated. It involves using the Firefox PDF Plug-in for Mac that we recommended with Firefox 4 but this time modifying it, and also running Firefox in 32 bit mode. There is a detailed guide on the Macworld site discussing how to modify the plug-in at http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110622163401497. We've tried this solution and found it works well, though it could be a little tricky for the computer novice.

Feel free to give us feedback in the comments to let us know which solution you're using and how well it works for you.